here's my picture of a perfect cloud mining contract:
The purchasing (hire-purchase perhaps?) of full hashboards, instead of piddly little GH/s.
Flexibility to change pools remotely, at the click of a button.
live-feed webcams watching over a warehouse of immersion cooled SP100's (i just made that up)
trading platform with other cloud users, to control pricing and p2p trading of your purchased hashboards.
Fees paid pro-rata by the user, not taken from mined rewards - if fees don't get paid, hashboards power down.
and most importantly - majority of the mining profit to the end user.
i think too much, granted. but some of these ideas are, for me, what might make a perfect cloud mining contract - in essence, i would still want to own the hardware, rather than rent TH/s.
This would be ideal, though if you look at the high-end server hosting market as an analogy what you describe would not be considered cloud mining. For example, take a look at Rackspace. You can lease from them both cloud servers as well as dedicated servers, the latter which could include your own firewalls, storage, backup and IDS/IPS hardware. For dedicated you get to pick from a standard set of hardware, configuration, lease term, and the service level. They set it up for you and manage as little or as much as you need.
I can see this happening for mining. You make your choice and quantity of commodity mining hardware, select your pool configuration, pay your mining equipment lease, power and management fees, and you get to keep ALL mining profits. The only problem is whether anyone can offer this kind of service without adding too much additional cost.